With the looming CAFE fuel economy standards, just about every automaker out there is pushing hard to migrate from larger displacement engines to engines with a smaller displacement, typically using a turbocharger to get the same sort of power output. The benefit of this is that it allows drivers to have the same performance with improved fuel economy.

One of the most successful automakers at making this transition away from higher displacement engines has been Ford with its line of EcoBoost power plants. Detroit News reports that Ford is projecting an increase in sales for vehicles using four-cylinder engines and that by 2020 66% of all new vehicles will use smaller displacement four-cylinder engines.

"I think it's maybe a stretch. But I don't find it implausible," said Bill Visnic, senior editor at the car research site Edmunds.com, in a telephone interview. "If you look at where things have been going segment by segment, except pickups, you could say that's been the trend."

In 2008, only 40% of new vehicles sold used four-cylinder engines compared to 53% today. Currently, the majority of small and medium-size cars on the automotive market come standard with a four-cylinder engine. Most compact SUVs also come standard with four-cylinder engine. Full-size pickups and full-size SUVs currently come with six and eight-cylinder engine options. In 2012, sales of pickup trucks accounted for 13% of all new market sales.

Mike Osmotoso of LMC Automotive notes that to achieve that 66% goal, "[Ford would be] expecting pickups and full-size SUVs to virtually disappear."

quote: That vast majority of the time I see a truck on the road, it's empty and not towing anything.

How do you know they're not going to pickup a load or have just dropped off a load? When we go get hay, we're empty. We don't put sh!t in the bed or tow a trailer behind our truck just so you guys can feel good about our purchase. LOL! We use our truck the way we feel like using it.

Not necessarily. Maybe that load only gets picked up a certain time of day and he only sees them when they're on their way to get it. When I used to drive a truck for a living, I typically would be empty during commutes when most people would see me. Did that mean I didn't need the truck. NOPE! It only means you saw me when I was empty. And that's my point

I personally don't own a truck and rent one whenever I do need one. But I only need a truck about 6 times a year. Each time I end up paying ~40 dollars for my 4 hour truck rentals + ~1 hour of "out of the way" time.

For a 15,000 miles a year driver, the difference between owning a car and a full-size (but not heavy duty) truck is around 200-300 gallons of gasoline in a year. Since the expected cost of gasoline has been typically less than 4 dollars over the past 5 years, the expected price to own a truck is less than 1,000 dollars a year.

If I value my time at around 10 dollars a hour, once I rent a truck 20 or more times in a year (and the rental is for less than a day each time), I end up spending more money than if I had just owned the truck in the first place. That works out to less than 2 truck trips a month! If I use my car/truck every day to travel to work, and tow a boat to a lake/etc every other weekend in summer, you might see me needing a truck ~1/20 trips or less!

Its a problem. I am unaware of a service that rents pick-ups at a rate reasonable enough to ensure that "light" users don't see it as economically viable to rent.